Van Buren Joins Local Environmental Nonprofit Board of Directors
SANTA FE, N.M - The New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC), a nonprofit, public interest environmental law firm, announces the appointment of long-time writer, artist, teacher and activist Alice van Buren to the Board of Directors. Van Buren, a former National Public Radio commentator, magazine editor, television researcher and writer, brings her passion for protecting the environment to this well respected organization.
“The addition of Alice to the Board ensures the organization will benefit from a diversity of experience, opinions and talents necessary to keep the New Mexico Environmental Law Center growing and moving forward,” states Board of Directors President Dale Pontius. “We are thrilled to have her.”
A Santa Fe resident for twelve years, van Buren is very excited about working with the NMELC.
“I’m honored to be joining the New Mexico Environmental Law Center Board,” says van Buren. “The board is a dedicated group with a sincere passion to protect the environment and people of New Mexico. Some industries don’t care about people, they care about profits and the only way to stop their continued degradation of our environment and communities is through legal advocacy. The NMELC works to do this every day and I look forward to bringing a new awareness about our mission any way I can.”
An artist with an activist bent, van Buren has spent the last ten years painting and building a series called “Crusader Follies.” The series includes a mini-golf course, “Gas Stations of the Cross,” which can be seen at Sculpture Ranch, a venue for outdoor and political art founded by van Buren and her husband, Nathaniel Hesse, in Santa Fe in 2002. In 2008, van Buren created an art project for the Santa Fe Historical/Hysterical Parade in the format of a street funeral for “Big Oil,” largely inspired by recent oil and gas extraction threats into the Galisteo Basin just south of Santa Fe.
Van Buren has shown her work most recently at the Phillip Bareiss Gallery in Taos and has items in collections at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, and elsewhere. She has published essays, articles and reviews in a wide range of journals in the U.S. and abroad. She is the author of Horse Latitudes (a memoir), Squashed Blossoms (essays), and three plays.
The New Mexico Environmental Law Center Board members are Dale Pontius, Susanne Hoffman-Dooley, Robby Rodriguez, David Henderson, Myron Armijo, Stuart Bluestone, Diana Bustamante, Donna House, Renee Ingold, Pablo Padilla, Jr., and Frank Sanchez.
INTERVIEWS AND IMAGES ARE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Contacts: Juana Colón,
Communications and Public Education Associate
New Mexico Environmental Law Center
505-989-9022 ext. 21